Quality? Calling those "quality" is a bit of a stretch. Installing was and still is a gamble and so is every tiny system update. That hasn't changed a bit. And I'm saying that as someone who was first introduced to Linux on a Matrox GPU.
To be fair, those were the best that were there back then.
But that was more than 20 years ago. Since then Intel came to work on Mesa, later AMD and various embedded GPU vendors, and now Nvidia is one of the worst options out there.
As long as one didn't have to downgrade X11, they were straightforward to install. You are right that upgrades was a pain, but I believe the drivers themselves were on-par with the Windows drivers.
